


Plausible Possibility

by cissues



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Drift Side Effects, Fluff, M/M, Post-War, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 12:08:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5707507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cissues/pseuds/cissues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt and Hermann experience some odd post-drift effects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plausible Possibility

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't finished a fic in 100000000 years so here you go! Short and sweet and very undetailed. I forgot to add what room they were in and why so just like use your imagination??? Hope it's not awful!!

Newton watches the video on his computer screen, the image itself only marginally blurry around the edges in a way he chalks up to sleep deprivation. The video depicts a gussied-up and beautified Mako Mori, the eyeliner and blush on her cheeks looking awkward and out of place on her. She keeps glancing to the empty space beside her as the interviewer asks her question after question about her exercise routine and how she made that drift suit _look so good_.

Newton snorts, pitying the girl as he recognizes the mild panic that accompanies an absence of one’s drift partner. He also recognizes the distress at the irrelevant and shallow questions because _come on_ , Mako just (helped) save the world! She lost her only guardian to the war. She is, by no means, thinking about her diet or how she rates the cuteness of the male rangers.

“Newton?” A crisp, posh voice cuts through Newt’s thoughts and concentration on the video.

Newt slides his eyes to the significantly blurrier-than-usual form of Hermann Gottlieb where he stands beside the bed. _Newt’s_ bed. Although, now that he thinks about it, this could very well be Hermann’s bed. It’s difficult to differentiate between their two existences ever since the drift and he’s still struggling to accurately separate their muddled aspects of each other.

“Hmm…?” Newt replies non-committedly, turning his gaze back to the computer screen.

“Why are you wearing my glasses?”

Newt pauses and then, after a beat, pauses the video on an image of Mako’s increasingly irritated expression.

“What?” He asks, already reaching up towards his face. Lo and behold, what he pulls away are not his own thick, black, square frames but Hermann’s thin, round, wire frames.

“Oh.” He says simply.

Shakily, he hands Hermann his glasses. Their glasses. _His_ glasses? _Hermann’s glasses_.

“Where are _my_ glasses?” He asks as Hermann gently removes the wire frames from Newton’s still trembling fingers. “I’m sure I don’t know.” Hermann replies, hanging the glasses by one arm on the neck of his night shirt.

“Do you have them? Maybe we had something like a muscle memory switch, you took my glasses and I took yours?” Newt says, attempting to reason with both himself and Hermann.

“I would urge you to recall the extent of your eye damage, Newton. I would not last more than a few seconds with your glasses without acquiring a fierce migraine.” Hermann says tiredly as he crawls in beside Newt. This gesture seems, in the moment, incredibly natural. Nothing odd or out of place about the way that Hermann settles against Newt’s side and leans his head heavily on Newt’s shoulder. It’s only after a few beats that they simultaneously realize the gravity of what is happening.

“On a scale of one to ten, how natural did that just feel to you?” Newt asks in a quiet, quick breath, already opening up a word document. Even before the document opened, Hermann reached out and used the keyboard to force close it. “We are not performing impromptu experiments on our theoretical drift after-effects.” Hermann says and his voice sounds tired. Newt almost feels bad, but mostly he feels bad about losing the opportunity to document what is surely a rare side-effect of the drift.

“We will, however,” Hermann adds as if reading Newt’s thoughts (which, due to the lack of data, a plausible possibility) “Receive the results of our brain scans and blood tests tomorrow and we can analyze _those_ in the morning.”  
 _Or, whenever we wake up_. Newt adds in his subconscious.  
“Quite.” Hermann replies which effectively proves the mind-reading theory. If only they were _documenting it_ , it could be something more baseless phenomena.

“This is weird.” Newt says after a few moments of silence where Hermann hadn’t actually moved from his uncharacteristic cuddling position and had, in fact, snuggled even closer. Hermann huffs and begins to shift away before Newt’s arm darts out to catch him and pull him close again.  
Newt clarifies, “I said weird, not unpleasant.”  
Hermann’s next huff sounds more pleased than the last one.

Newt unpaused the interview and they both fall into verbal and mental silence for some blissful moments. It wasn’t until Hermann’s grunts and groans of frustration become too obnoxious to continue to ignore that Newt pauses the video again.

“It’s truly disgusting.” Hermann murmurs, anger making his voice sharp and fierce. “Ms. Mori is a war hero and they can’t think of better questions to ask her than ‘what nail polish color would you recommend for Gipsy Danger fans’. It’s nauseating.”  
With that, Hermann reaches over and taps the screen on a thumbnail of the same interviewer speaking to Raleigh Becket.

The questions are, predictably, much more interesting and relevant to the end of the world. Raleigh is asked about his training, about his time in construction, about the technical aspects of Gipsy and how she differed from other Jaegers. He tries, desperately, to explain that Mako was actually the one that knew the most about Gipsy and that he’s just the pilot, but the interviewer won’t have it. He just throws knowing looks at Raleigh and insists that he doesn’t have to be so modest here. He is the hero, afterall.

Finally, Hermann snaps the laptop shut and places it aside, turning his body into Newt’s and making a few indistinguishable, frustrated noises.

“It’s okay, Hermann,” Newt says reassuringly as he went to (sarcastically) stroke Hermann’s hair, “I’ll take all the make-up questions. You can be the war hero.”

Hermann simply snorts, leaning into the touch. The stroking continues and the cuddling continues and it’s with a rush that Newt realizes that something fundamental has changed in their relationship.

“I hadn’t expected it to go like this.” Hermann says with a wry smile peeking out from where his face is buried in Newt’s shoulder.

“Me neither.” Newt says. He laughs dryly and allows his hand to fall from Hermann’s hair to his shoulder, down his arm, to intertwine their fingers. “But I guess the drift doesn’t exactly allow for secrets.”

“That it does not.”

They were quiet for another moment but as Newt is quick to realize, the silence is never actually silence with them anymore. It is very much a constant and comfortable nonverbal conversation between the two, always finding and analyzing new information that exists within them but does not exactly belong.

“How long ago was it?” Newt asks, feeling a little breathless. Hermann laughs quietly. “Since we first started corresponding.”  
The breath releases from Newt suddenly. “Wow, that long?”  
Hermann nods. “And you?”  
“Pretty much the same, actually.”  
“Pretty much?” Hermann glances up at him curiously.

Newt sighs, rubbing a hand over his hair. “My, um… attraction to people is more complicated than that.” He says and suddenly Hermann hums with understanding as the strange and convoluted way that Newt’s sexuality and romantic orientation works spills into his brain. How it relies heavily on how reliable of a connection there is. How it is based in how sure he is that someone likes him back. How sometimes even then he would split on them and completely lose whatever he thought might have been there.

He’s already gone through the whole song and dance with Hermann and here Hermann is, curled up against him listening attentively to what he has to say. He knows, intimately and in excruciating detail, how invested Hermann is.

“Ah.” Hermann says, still smiling. Newt hadn’t exactly noticed how amazingly brilliant Hermann’s smile was before, but it was. Especially now with his intimate knowledge of how little Hermann actually smiled (both from his memory and Hermann’s), each smile felt like a gift. With that, Newt smiled back.  
“You must know how honored I am to be such an exception for you.” Hermann adds, curling back into Newt. Newt huffs a laugh.  
“You are an anomaly.” Newt says. Hermann’s body vibrated with quiet, nearly silent laughter and then it went suddenly lax. Newt would panic if he wasn’t so aware of how exhausted they both are, parallelled but differentiated by the way each handled it. As Hermann slips quickly into a deep sleep - the closeness of their bodies so comforting that even Newt felt his eyes tugging so insistently closed - Newt settles and opens his laptop again, feeling more at home here then any other place he’d lived.


End file.
